Safety of School Buildings

Cat Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)]

For over a year now, Ministers have known that school buildings posed “a risk to life”, and it has been more than a year since the Department for Education escalated the risk of building collapse to “very likely”, yet the Government will still not tell parents, teachers or pupils where those dangerous school buildings are. That is why this motion, which I support today, seeks to answer this question: where are our school buildings that are in dangerous condition and how severe is the disrepair of those buildings? Ministers know that buildings are at risk of collapse, yet they are still hiding the reality of this Conservative-made crisis from the public they supposedly serve.

After the upheaval of the pandemic, crumbling school buildings neglected by the Conservatives could see even more disruption to our children’s learning and education. Education is one of the most precious gifts we give our children. At the very least, parents expect it to be delivered in a safe school building, and I think most would expect to see it delivered in buildings fit for the 21st century. How can we tell our children and young people that we value their education, when we offer them education in substandard buildings? I heard from one Lancaster primary school headteacher this week who told me:

“We have, and continue to, really struggle to access any funding to refurbish our toilets, which are in a very poor state. It is really frustrating as we are not asking for luxury items—access to toilets which are fit for purpose is a basic need!”

It is not just the roofs at risk of collapse, buckets in corridors and peeling paint that are the outward display of the lack of value the Government place on our children’s education. It is, frankly, even the state of the toilets, with all the health implications of that. The Secretary of State must publish detailed school-level data from the latest condition of school buildings survey.

The challenge faced by small rural schools is exacerbated. A rural primary school headteacher from a school in Wyre told me today:

“We can’t afford to employ a site supervisor for our federation of two small village schools. This means that we pay massively over the odds when we need repairs doing. Recently, we have appealed to parents who are plumbers/electricians/carpenters to make repairs for us to save money.”

That is certainly a big step up from most parent teacher associations.

Many schools are not fit for the future. Teachers cannot focus on education if they are having to manage inadequate facilities. Labour’s Building Schools for the Future programme, which ramped up capital funding in the late 2000s, was scrapped by this Government in 2010. Thirteen years later, we now have an entire generation of children who have seen nothing but decline in our school buildings. Does the Minister agree that it is impossible to give children a first-class education in second-class school buildings? Does he agree with the shadow Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Houghton and Sunderland South (Bridget Phillipson), that parents worried about the state of their children’s school buildings have a right to know the scale of the problem?

If Conservative MPs vote today to keep parents in the dark about the condition of school buildings, that means that in Lancashire, despite 236 buildings being categorised as bad and in urgent need of repair, those parents are being let down. Their children’s future is being let down. One of the greatest privileges of being a Member of Parliament is the opportunity to visit schools and see the amazing work that our teachers do. Often, it is also an opportunity to see the state of the buildings that teachers are working in, children are learning in and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Olivia Blake) pointed out, parents are accessing—putting their health at risk, too.